Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism

By John Bodnar

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman described his admiration for the Union soldiers' loyalty to the ideal of democracy. His argument, that this faith bonded Americans to their nation, has received little critical attention, yet today it raises increasingly relevant questions about American patriotism in the face of growing nationalist sentiment worldwide. Here a group of scholars explores the manner in which Americans have discussed and practiced their patriotism over the past two hundred years. Their essays investigate, for example, the extent to which the promise of democracy has explained citizen loyalty, what other factors--such as devotion to home and family--have influenced patriotism, and how patriotism has often served as a tool to maintain the power of a dominant group and to obscure internal social ills.


This volume examines the use of patriotic language and symbols in building unity in the early republic, rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, and sustaining loyalty in an increasingly diverse society. Continuing through the World Wars to the Clinton presidency, the essay topics range from multiculturalism to reactions toward masculine power. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Cynthia M. Koch, Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, Andrew Neather, Stuart McConnell, Gaines M. Foster, Kimberly Jensen, David Glassberg and J. Michael Moore, Lawrence R. Samuel, Robert B. Westbrook, Wendy Kozol, George Lipsitz, Barbara Truesdell, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and William B. Cohen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691219363

Book preview

Introduction

THE ATTRACTIONS OF PATRIOTISM

JOHN BODNAR

WALT WHITMAN knew why Americans were patriotic. He saw it in the devotion they exhibited during the Civil War. As he stood by the beds of dying soldiers in Washington, he marveled at the way they faced death and their refusal to show cowardly qualms. Their gallantry, in the opinion of the noted poet, was rooted in their dreams of democracy.

The movements of the late secession war and their results, to any sense that studies well and comprehends them, show that popular democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts. Probably no future age can know, but I well know, how the gist of this fiercest and most resolute of the world’s war-like contentions resided exclusively in the named, unknown rank and file; and how the brunt of its labour of death was, to all essential purposes, volunteered. The People of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, . . . not for gain or even glory, nor to repel invasion—but for an emblem, a mere abstraction, for the life, for the safety of the flag.¹

How accurate was Whitman? Was patriotism in America largely grounded in the aspirations of its people for democracy and equal rights for all? At plenty of moments in American history this certainly appeared to be the case. Abraham Lincoln told his audience at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863 that the sacrifices made at the site were justified only if living Americans continued to foster the creation of a nation of equals devoted to the principles of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A century later Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech to demonstrators for civil rights insisted that the nation must deliver on its promise of equality for all citizens. Both Lincoln and King were patriots: they saw their fates interconnected with the destiny of other citizens in a common project to build a democratic and egalitarian society.²

But there were other rationales for serving flag and country. In 1782, George Washington rebuked an officer of the Revolutionary Army for suggesting that he accept the crown of a king as a reward for the role he played in serving the new nation. Washington felt that virtuous men manifested loyalty by serving the common good with no expectations of return. The first president said nothing about creating a nation of equals, but he did aspire to the values of eighteenth-century republicanism and its promise of a society where prominent men would serve and govern the public rather than tyrannical despots or the unknown rank and file. And what are we to make of the loyalty of either Boston protestors in 1976 who carried an American flag to denounce antiwar hippies and radical blacks and defend their working-class neighborhood against government plans for school integration or Ku Klux Klan organizations in the 1920s that sought to purify their nation of certain religious, ethnic, and racial groups? They did not appear to be calling for either more virtue or democracy. But how do these citizens relate to the views of Lincoln or Whitman?

This collection of essays on the manner in which Americans defined their patriotism describes a people with a complex understanding of the nature of loyalty and affiliation. The beliefs of Lincoln and Whitman were widely shared and central to American political thought over time. But patriotic thought could be a maze within both the minds of individuals and the nation as a whole. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, citizens were influenced powerfully by the ideas of republicanism and classical liberalism. They often blended ideals of service to the common good of all with hopes for a nation that would insure individual freedom from any form of tyranny. Frequently, their veneration of universal ideals such as virtue masked more particular goals of male domination. In the twentieth century, the articulation of specific goals in patriotic language became more pronounced. Workers invoked the traditional symbols of freedom and democracy to call for the right to unionize, and women asked for fairness from their government in the quest to meet family and career responsibilities. But Americans also debated more extensively the issue of national power. Some patriots attacked the state for wielding excessive influence over their private lives. Others applauded the dominance of the nation over other nations. Throughout this collection of essays we must keep in mind an important point made by Merle Curti, a pioneer in the study of American patriotism: loyalty in the United States derived its strength from its ability to accommodate several interests at once.³

In the late twentieth century, the need to understand the tangled history of this patriotism is compelling. Some Americans feel that their fellow citizens have lost many ties they formerly had to their country. This anxiety over loyalty has revolved to a great extent around the issues of multiculturalism and individualism. Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, wrote in 1992 that he felt himself to be just a plain American because he could not place an adjective before his nationality. He lamented that citizens now only acquire a presence as an old American, a female American, a white American, a rich American, a black American, a gay American, a poor American, a native American, or a dead American. When Lapham argued that the subordination of the noun to the adjectives mocked the democratic spirit, he meant to affirm the universalist character of the liberal view of patriotism and critique the more insular expressions of various groups. Inferentially, he also rejected the twentieth-century pattern of expecting rights and benefits from the liberal state as a grounds for loyalty, although such expectations may explain the proliferation of narrow identities he abhors.⁴

Authors like Arthur Schlesinger and Allan Bloom crafted best-selling books that discussed the threat of multiculturalism to the existence of the American nation. Both writers felt that the increased veneration of racial, gendered, and even individual identities poses a distinct threat to the common project of nation building. Schlesinger scolded extremists who distorted the teaching of United States history for the sake of engendering pride in minority groups. The prominent historian feared that minorities were forgetting that, in the absence of common ethnic and racial origins, the United States was held together by adherence to ideals of democracy and human rights. For Schlesinger a cult of ethnicity had emerged among minorities that challenged the dream of creating one people.⁵

Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind located the threat to national unity and loyalty in the selfishness of individuals rather than in the group-based interests of minorities. In place of Schlesinger’s multicultural zealots, Bloom saw the nation threatened by egocentric citizens who appear to have few group attachments of any kind. Thus, he saw the sexual revolution, rising divorce rates, and an overall transformation in private life as destructive of social stability. Like Schlesinger, he also detested the fragmentation of the educational curriculum and the failure to teach a common core of subjects that offer instruction in human values and civic responsibility. Both authors, to an extent, longed for a return of past ideals: Schlesinger for Whitman’s and Bloom for Washington’s.⁶

The persistent critique of narrow interests and group loyalties and the quest for a common ground originated, moreover, in more than just the fear of social fragmentation. It also represented a deeply held belief in American exceptionalism. The political culture of the United States was thought exemplary in its ability to moderate group differences through its faith in the notion of equality and democracy. And to a great extent this was a true, if at times myopic, point of view. Modern studies of nationalism, in fact, demonstrate just how unique the idea of a nation totally committed to democratic vistas has been. For instance, after visiting modern battlefields of nationalism in Croatia, Serbia, and the Ukraine, Michael Ignatieff distinguished civic nationalism from ethnic nationalism. The former affirms that a nation is composed of citizens, equal regardless of their special identities; such a political community is held together by a patriotic attachment to the ideals of equal rights and democracy. To the contrary, ethnic nationalism (or any particularistic form) fosters the idea that a community of racial, ethnic, or religious groups defines the individual and the nation. The fundamental appeal to loyalty is usually made as part of an effort either to defend the political community against external threats or to purify it of unwanted elements within the community. Equality, reciprocity, and fairness do not count for much in this conception.⁷

Scholars now acknowledge, perhaps more than they once did, that nationalism is greater than a dream of equality and that narrower interests were never far removed from the politics of nationhood. As Tony Judt has incisively suggested, the optimistic universalism of the liberal vision may have been confined only to a few fortunate people and places during the past two centuries. Most nationalisms, in fact, have emerged from encounters with external forms of power and fears of further domination by others, often generated in the breakup of old empires. This was certainly the case for Greece as it emerged out of the old Ottoman Empire or Croatia as it grew from what was Yugoslavia.

Liah Greenfeld has underscored the point that nationalism almost always promises self-respect and relief from domination by others. Thus, she argues that ethnic forms of nationalism make people feel better (and more secure) than civic nationalism with its unspecified pledge of equality. I would add that they are also potentially more attractive than simple but earnest calls to moral action and selflessness. Put another way, it may be easier for people to feel self-respect in belonging to a group of heroic soldiers, proud blacks, or chosen Protestants than to a larger, unspecified community of equals. Greenfeld argues correctly that the United States went further in achieving civic nationalism and liberal patriotism than nearly every other country, and in this sense it is unique. She attributes this to its rich legacy of English liberalism and to the New World’s absence of entrenched hierarchies that usually counter such liberal impulses. But this collection also suggests that the attachments to particularistic loyalties—gendered, ethnic, racial and religious—were not only pervasive (which most people know), but also fundamental to popular understandings of patriotism. As much as most of us want Lincoln to be our hero, his vision was modified throughout American history.⁸ This is the import of a recent essay by political scientist Rogers M. Smith. Directly confronting the myth that American politics has been largely dominated by the adherence of its people to free and egalitarian ideas, Smith advances a more nuanced view. He prefers to talk of multiple traditions when describing American political culture.⁹

From the beginning of the American nation, political culture was variegated. The republican attempt to create a society in which public affairs were conducted by men in a disinterested fashion and animated by virtue rather than self-interest was never a true reflection of what most citizens thought and felt. Republican patriotism was fixed on the notion of self-sacrifice for the good of all, but it was extended by liberal aspirations for a more democratic and equal society. The problem with republicanism was its failure to address the democratic and special aspirations of the masses. As Gordon Wood has so brilliantly explained, the egalitarian impulses inherent in the republican dream of replacing a monarchy with a society of virtuous citizens gave way to the stronger attraction of equality and democracy. Most leaders of the American Revolution would not have been comfortable with fostering such a pervasive leveling of American society, but the issue moved beyond their control. By the era of the Civil War, as James M. McPherson discovered in reading letters and diaries, soldiers in both the North and the South were moved to fight because of a genuine belief in the ideas of freedom and liberty. The Union men saw their ideal threatened in the attempt to destroy national solidarity; rebels viewed the federal government as a danger to their states’ rights version of political aspirations.

But equality was not just an end in itself. Even in the eighteenth century, Wood is quick to note that both republicanism and liberalism had limits. While people eagerly pursued democracy, they also attempted to use their membership in the new nation and their equality to secure private interests. Everywhere, Wood writes, the ‘tender connections among men’ that the Revolution was supposed to foster were being ‘reduced to nothing’ by ‘the infinite diversities of family, tribe, and nation.’ In both the American past and present the pursuit of equality involved the quest for advantage as well.¹⁰

The expression of narrow interest became so widespread by the middle of the nineteenth century that some political leaders sought to defend and expand the power of the central government more forcefully over its constituent parts. At this point in the nation’s history Lincoln purposefully transformed the notion of liberalism that had inspired so much patriotism and national sentiment. In the crisis of the Civil War, Lincoln concluded that it was no longer sufficient to venerate the ideals of popular government and equal rights alone. As J. David Greenstone has so effectively argued, the sixteenth president realized that political institutions now had to intervene in society and resolve moral issues such as slavery. Unlike many abolitionists who felt that moral problems could be settled by attempts at transforming the ethical outlook of individuals, Lincoln, retaining his faith in democracy and equality, now added the ideal of an activist state to the ideology of American liberalism. He could not, of course, foresee the vast expansion of state power in response to industrial capitalism in the twentieth century. Lincoln raised the expectations of citizens by inferring that the state could not simply represent ideals but had an obligation to engage in practices that would correct injustices in the real world. He would not ask citizens simply to have faith in American ideals as Schlesinger did. Rather, he offered the possibility that American political institutions could not expect support if they did not actively pursue a just society.¹¹

Following the war and Lincoln’s death, the powers of the central government and the state steadily increased, although not always in pursuit of equal rights for all. Curti demonstrated how the conception of the nation as an organic whole that subordinated the interests of its various parts—states, classes, ethnicities—emerged more forcefully in the late nineteenth century. This movement, however, was not some falsehood foisted by powerful industrial leaders to facilitate the growth of a national, capitalistic economy; rather, it was a joint effort of managerial, professional, labor, agricultural, and cultural ranks to create a new form of state-managed liberalism, often called corporate liberalism. Unfairness was not eradicated, and equality remained an unfulfilled dream. New immigrants, African Americans, and women certainly held marginal voices in this political world. But the direction was toward some form of accommodation between many constituent parts of society under the aegis of a strong state. Leading political figures like Theodore Roosevelt staunchly defended the concept and combined a belief in state power over private interests, a love of country transcending devotion to any section or class, and the need for reciprocity. Roosevelt could not see how allegiance to the country could exist if the country did not make life worth living for its diverse citizens.¹²

The activist role of the liberal state became so great by the 1930s that economic justice and industrial democracy became its stated political goals. In the twentieth century equality was pursued through organized groups who used the state to advance their interests and return their loyalty in the form of influence or benefits. They did this not because they had abandoned hope in popular government and equal rights but because they now believed, as Lincoln did, that state intervention was necessary for attaining a liberal society. The New Deal favored working men and class interests over matters more defined by race and gender, but the administration of Franklin Roosevelt did attempt to redistribute political power to workers and farmers so that they could compete effectively against business and acquire the wages needed to sustain a consumerist economy. As Gary Gerstle has shown, the New Deal was able to tap a reservoir of patriotism from the American public because it was perceived to be in part a moral crusade for economic justice. Working-class leaders now joined the traditional liberal language of equal rights and democracy with the mechanism of an activist state.¹³

Not until the 1960s, when the liberal state was attacked by various groups for its policies regarding race and South Vietnam, did Lincoln’s idea of a state that resolved moral issues and Roosevelt’s notion of one that settled economic issues fall into disfavor. Certainly some patriots felt Roosevelt’s path toward state management of social life was contrary to older traditions and, therefore, unpatriotic. During the 1940s the government relied on both traditional liberal promises of egalitarianism and modern ones of rewarding loyal citizens to generate support for its war policies. But in the 1960s an erosion of faith in an activist liberal state opened up public space for celebrations of power and particularistic loyalties in ways that resembled the 1920s. Thus, lower middle-class whites used patriotic symbols and language to resist court-ordered (and state-sponsored) integration of their schools and neighborhoods because they no longer felt the state supported their moral views. Various religious groups fervently opposed the state sanction of a woman’s right to an abortion and the plan to pass an equal rights amendment to the constitution. Black power advocates and radical feminists expressed reservations toward any form of veneration of the liberal state, an institution they saw as merely a bastion of white male domination. The demise of the liberal state continued into the 1980s and 1990s with victories by conservatives who sought to dismantle or alter much of the liberal agenda. Indeed, precisely at the moment when the activist state lost much of its hold over the popular imagination did public anxiety over patriotism and national cohesion emerge so forcefully. Today, what Raphael Samuel has written of postwar Great Britain can be applied to the United States: these years have seen a decline in the majesty of the state . . . and a valorization of the private at the expense of the public sphere.¹⁴

This collection intends to demonstrate that, indeed, the nature of patriotism in the United States is controversial. The appeal of egalitarianism and the promise of democracy is powerful but limited. Throughout U.S. history desires for a more equal society have clashed with sectarian aspirations of purity and dominance. The attempt to encase patriotism within the dream of equality or the call to virtue was contested by many who sought rewards for their loyalty in more explicit forms or wanted to realize desires for power and mastery. The liberal version of patriotism was an agreement between not only citizens and the nation but also citizens themselves. Each person had to respect both the nation-state for its ability to protect the ideal of equality and the right of fellow citizens to fair treatment. The attempt to direct loyalty to the nation-state alone, an effort that consumed much time in the past, was never a guarantee that citizen rights would be protected. And citizens saw this flaw. As this collection of essays shows, the call to obligation toward the nation and exhortations toward virtuous behavior, which punctuate the culture today, were continually refashioned by popular expressions of equality, justice, self-interest, and power.

By taking Washington, Whitman, Lincoln, and King further than they wanted to go, these essays suggest that the meaning of patriotism in America was molded by competing understandings of what the nation should be. Lincoln’s terms of loyalty were sustained and expanded to an exceptional extent; alternative versions abounded. Contemporary disputes over whether patriotism is disappearing in the United States, as a matter of course, almost never raise the issue of how its citizens have defined their allegiance.

Our bonds of affection have always been subjected to complex interpretations. The earliest view of a virtuous nation of equals gave way by the late nineteenth century to a dream of a powerful nation rooted in the desires of powerful men and women who supported it for order and moral certainty at home and in the world. This position, often presenting patriotism as a virtue, was heavily influenced by the more aggressive sentiments of nationalism and the quest for domination of others, both inside and outside the United States. In this version true patriots were often represented as male warriors. Alternatively a liberal version of patriotism was grounded in the hope of fair treatment for all citizens. In the nineteenth century this view, restricted to general appeals for equality and democracy, received its strongest manifestations in the eradication of slavery. In the twentieth century this outlook involved a more explicit call for reciprocity from the nation in the form of state intervention in both private and public life and in the form of benefits. Because all people and groups are susceptible to the attractions of power and justice, and because both coexisted in the language of patriotism, its appeal frequently crossed class, ethnic, regional, and gender borders and took unexpected turns. Citizens used patriotism for good and for malice. Thus, this history of patriotism cannot be confused with our society’s endless calls for patriotism by voices that are often more partisan than they appear.

In the early nineteenth century, as Cynthia Koch shows, the public discussion over patriotism was dominated by the tenets of republicanism and the standpoints of powerful men. George Washington stood as an emblem: a citizen who served his country to promote the common good, and a male who protected women. Asking for nothing in return, he acquired power but did not want to keep it. His philosophy of republicanism certainly sought to create a society more just than the one it replaced. But it also moderated drives toward democracy and equality, not by venerating national power, but by celebrating virtue.

After the Civil War the opinions of males, especially veterans and businessmen, continued to dominate the discourse over patriotism. But the essays of Cecilia O’Leary, Stuart McConnell, Gaines Foster, and Andrew Neather demonstrate that agreement over the meaning of loyalty in the late nineteenth century was not easily achieved. Despite a strong tradition of republicanism and the pleas of Lincoln at Gettysburg to link loyalty and democracy, the doctrines of virtue and equality were widely challenged. This collection explains that the period from the Civil War to World War I presented American citizens with new problems that forced them to redefine their notion of faithfulness. The emasculation of southern manhood, the need for political reconciliation, the intensification of class conflict, and the acquisition of economic and world power all combined to encourage a greater idealization of male warrior heroism and aggressive nationalism at the expense of older republican and democratic dreams. O’Leary’s work shows that the drive for reunification resulted in the valorization of battlefield deeds and the creation of heroic warriors by veterans in both the North and the South. The veteran construction of patriotism not only replaced the focus on virtue with valor but also eradicated the patriotic struggle for black rights from the public memory of the war.

A militaristic, masculine sense of nationalism alone could not hope to attract the interest of men and women in a society as diverse as the United States, however. Stuart McConnell explains that a determined effort emerged in the 1890s to create an even more abstract form of national unity that could appeal to various regions and groups. As American society simultaneously became more integrated economically and more diverse culturally, an attempt was made to fashion patriotic symbols that would appeal to the broadest possible segment of the nation. McConnell’s study of the patriotic boom of the 1890s suggests that the ideals of republicanism or liberalism were insufficient to sustain loyalty by themselves in the face of growing class and ethnic conflict and inequality. Thus, to reduce the attachments people had to vernacular symbols, the veneration of patriotic symbols like the national flag was intensified.

Andrew Neather offers a unique contribution: he demonstrates that the forces celebrating greater national unity and power met resistance from the old attachment some Americans had to the ideals of equality. Neather shows that the late-nineteenth-century working class made a determined bid to use patriotic messages and symbols to sustain the notion of equality, but a spirit of empire and commerce cut the proletarians short. Responding to the longing of many males for domination over others, workers and businessmen rallied to a vision of empire and loyalty that was determined more by nationalist than by democratic aspirations. The idea of a powerful nation-state became so pervasive by 1900 that, as Gaines Foster implies, it could successfully compete with older religious loyalties that had been deeply held for years. Although many Americans continued to believe that the nation was part of God’s overall plan, reason enough to elicit their loyalty, the grounds for patriotism were becoming more secular than sacred and implicated in the lust for power to a greater extent than the dream of fairness.

The triumph of state liberalism was pivotal to the history of patriotism in the twentieth century. Although based partially in an attempt to insure justice for workers, farmers, professionals, and businessmen, state liberalism also led more directly to the glorification of state power and a more robust form of nationalism. This fact ultimately had two crucial implications for our times. First, a powerful state was inevitably a masculine state—a reflection of male longings for dominance at home and abroad. The gendered aspect of loyalty was fortified by the tumultuous experience of warfare in this century and the opportunity it created to venerate the sacrifices of male warriors for the nation. Second, the awesome power of the state turned it into a battleground. Conservatives who feared the authority of the state but not the concept of authority mounted efforts to protect local interests from a centralized government. This idea was manifested by the marchers in Boston in 1976 as well as by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s or the Moral Majority in the 1980s. Liberals, however, retained a faith in the state to both promote fairness and reward loyalty in just and beneficial ways. Thus, modern feminists who worked for more government money for child care also thought of themselves as patriotic. They proved the assertion that Kimberly Jensen makes in her essay: the more the state demanded of its citizens, the more they were able to ask in return.

Dreams of power and dreams of fairness continued to collide to an exceptional extent even in wartime. The essays of Kimberly Jensen, David Glassberg and J. Michael Moore, Lawrence Samuel, and Robert Westbrook reveal how crucial war is to the modern definition of patriotism and how much it forces the state to concede the basic point that citizens earn credit for their loyalty. Consequently, Jensen demonstrates how during World War I some women in different sectors of American society exhibited their devotion in the hope of gaining a greater voice in public affairs. She complements O’Leary and Neather by revealing that despite the rise of a masculine, business-centered patriotism and its ability to undermine the public view of women and minorities, the dream of equality did not vanish. In a few instances, voices of women completely opposed to the very concept of a warrior nation were heard. David Glassberg and J. Michael Moore make this point in their study of how one town in Massachusetts finally decided to commemorate World War I.

In a similar manner, Lawrence Samuel and Robert Westbrook find American citizens expressing hope that their service to the nation and national institutions will be rewarded in the 1940s. Samuel’s examination of how war bonds were sold to African Americans during World War II presents the case that racial minorities still clung to ideals of justice, reciprocity, and solidarity despite the reality of injustice and subordination. The wartime administration of Franklin Roosevelt, obviously sensitive to these desires, in return for support of the war effort determined to promise more rewards to not only blacks but all American citizens. Westbrook further acknowledges that popular patriotism during the war was strongly based both in private interests and the dream of reciprocity. Astutely investigating the reaction Americans had to Japanese political culture during World War II, Westbrook shows that Americans were attached to a sense of individualism and particularistic goals. They certainly found the culture and loyalty of the Japanese that called for unquestioned devotion to state authority and unlimited sacrifice unappealing. Thus, Westbrook’s work effectively raises the issue of how a liberal society, committed to a vision of free and equal individuals, can nurture strong bonds of affection to other citizens and to the nation itself. He suggests that in the war with Japan the American state maintained loyalty only by extending the vision of Lincoln with promises to reward and protect the particular ties Americans had to families and local, ethnic, and racial communities. But much of the collection suggests that this was a central theme of American patriotic meaning throughout the twentieth century.

In the flush of postwar victory American patriotism became more tangled than ever. The last half of this century has witnessed a decided struggle over whether illiberalism with its devotion to individualism and abstract symbols of national strength will gain supremacy over explicit calls for justice and democracy through state action. In the aftermath of the Good War, it was difficult to deny the attractive symbols of a strong nation and the men who defended it. Thus, John Wayne was a patriotic box office hero by 1950. The reality of the Cold War further reinforced the power of illiberal patriotism and its need to venerate national strength. In this climate masculine versions of nationalism pervaded the culture at large. The fruits of victory were delivered more directly to the warriors in the form of jobs and educational supports. Women were generally expected to vacate their wartime occupations and return to serving men in the home. The quintessential patriotic symbol of the wartime experience, the Iwo Jima Memorial, conveyed the supremacy of masculine power and the authority of a triumphant and united nation. Thus, it comes as no surprise to learn that when Wendy Kozol investigated the manner in which Life magazine represented and discussed the nation in the 1950s it stressed the value of the nuclear family. Kozol notes that the wartime version of patriotism was now reconceptualized into images of female domesticity and consumerism, a formula that left the public life of the nation largely in the hands of men.

Unlike World War II, the conflict in Vietnam did not result in promises that loyalty to the nation-state would be rewarded in victory. Government officials were busy attempting to defend their policies from many who came close to fitting John Schaar’s description of citizens who no longer thought patriotic thoughts.¹⁵ The loudest proclamations of patriotism in the 1960s emanated from groups who associated it with the desire to win the conflict in Asia. Studies by George Lipsitz and Barbara Truesdell also prove that efforts to define loyalty in terms of masculine heroes and a strong nation continued even after the war was lost.

Lipsitz’s inquiry into the version of patriotism that dominated American discourse in the 1980s makes clear that masculine dreams and warrior heroes were not erased from public memory or political discourse during the 1960s. Lipsitz describes how the new patriotism of the 1980s differed from the old patriotism of the 1940s. In the recent era government leaders like Ronald Reagan rarely addressed aspects of our national identity like the four freedoms defined by Franklin Roosevelt. In place of what the state could do for the people, especially those dislocated by plant closings and corporate restructuring, patriotism in the 1980s offered spectacles of power and the veneration of elite groups of warriors. The new patriotism even attempted to revise the memory of Vietnam: the war was recalled not as a loss or a mistake but as a valiant effort to preserve the free world. Women who supported this masculine version of the nation and national loyalty are ably described by Barbara Truesdell who visited a national meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She found these patriotic women celebrating not only male warriors but patriot missiles as well.

As America entered the 1990s, however, the meaning of patriotism was unresolved. Public opinion polls suggested some ambiguity. A 1994 Gallup survey found that while 64 percent of Americans felt they were extremely or very patriotic, 35 percent described themselves as somewhat or not especially loyal. Visions of the nation grounded in unity, virtue, democracy, reciprocity, and group interest were all expressed with regularity. Commentators like Schlesinger and Bloom blamed multiculturalists and egoists for abandoning liberal creeds and moral traditions; these authors refused to confront the intricate history of American patriotism. In our times virile patriotism was strongly opposed by many defenders of state liberalism. In the eyes of Robin Wagner-Pacifici, the masculine and militarized renditions of national loyalty are actually under severe stress, perhaps more than the nation itself. President Bill Clinton, in his support for homosexuals and failure to accept the role of a warrior-patriot in his youth, evoked open hostility from the guardians of traditions of a strong nation. Wagner-Pacifici’s study of encounters between the new president and the military revealed that the promotion of a feminized and more democratic vision of the nation was strong but not unopposed. In an examination of how a working-class community recalled the experience of loyalty in the past, my essay on an industrial town reveals a complex story that, despite its local base, approximates the mixed nature of patriotism on the national level. Informants exhibit both an attachment to the ideal of reciprocity as a basis for devotion, a fundamental ingredient in twentieth-century liberal thought, and a dream of national unity and solidarity. Despite particularistic communal attachments, much of their narrative about the past is told in the present out of a genuine concern that the nation remain a viable community of citizens with some concern for each other.¹⁶

This book does not cover all aspects of the history of American patriotism or the career that it has enjoyed over two centuries. But the volume does indicate that Americans drew upon certain fundamental ideals time and again when thinking about how they would pledge allegiance. Universal and parochial aspirations intermingled; elements of liberalism in both classic and modern forms were remarkably powerful. The concluding essay on Europe by William Cohen infers that the intermingling of traditions within the idea of a nation was not unique to the United States. But Cohen’s essay also suggests that Europe may have been more consumed with a fear of foreign domination throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the United States. Thus, European nationalisms and patriotisms were more focused on national unity and power at the expense of a powerful tradition of liberalism. This collection suggests also that current debate over loyalties is not new. Past and present Americans took the idea of nationhood seriously and extensively debated its character. What else can explain all the arguments over the bonds of affection?

This introduction has benefited from the valuable criticisms of Casey N. Blake. The entire collection benefited from the assistance of Barb Truesdell and Beth Glenn.

¹ Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Leaves of Grass and Other Selected Prose, ed. Ellman Grasnow (London: Everyman, 1993), 616–19.

² Roy Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1976), 577, 579–91, 734; Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–3, 20–24; James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 217–20.

³ Washington’s letter of rebuke, along with other republican expressions of patriotism, is reprinted in William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 671–72, 717–18. Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 151. Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Athenaeum, 1968), viii.

⁴ Who and What Is American: The Things We Continue to Hold in Common, Harper’s Magazine (January 1992), 43–49. See John Schaar, The Case for Patriotism, The American Review 17 (May 1973): 59–99.

⁵ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 102–26.

⁶ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

⁷ Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993), 7–11. For a discussion on the appeal of equality and fair treatment for all citizens as a basis for nationalism and patriotism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 141–54. For an incisive and fresh discussion of the idea of America’s unique political culture, see Michael Kammen, The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration, American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 1–43.

⁸ Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 400–484; see also Tony Judt, The New Old Nationalism, The New York Review of Books 42, no. 10 (26 May 1994): 44–51.

⁹ Rogers M. Smith, Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America, American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 549–66.

¹⁰ Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 249–52; James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 6, 9, 35–36.

¹¹ J. David Greenstone, The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), xx–xxxii, 244–54, 284–85.

¹² Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty, 92–93, 174–79, 196–97; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 28; Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 35–36.

¹³ See Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 330; Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Gerstle, The Protean Character of American Liberalism, American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043. The illiberal patriotism of the 1920s, especially nativism, is incisively discussed by John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 264–99.

¹⁴ See Leo Ribuffo, Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything about It? American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 438–99; Alan Brinkley, The Problem of American Conservatism, American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 409–29; Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Historians, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 33, nos. 1–2 (1992): 58–80. Marian Wright Edelman, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 19, 43, 54–55. On the relationship between feminism and state power, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 157–60. Also see Anne McClintock, Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family, Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993): 61–80. Raphael Samuel, Introduction: Exciting to Be English, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Samuel, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989), l:xxix.

¹⁵ Schaar, The Case for Patriotism.

¹⁶ The Gallup poll was conducted 17–19 June 1994. I would like to thank Kim Elaine Neighbor of The Gallup Organization for sending me the results.

Chapter 1

TEACHING PATRIOTISM:

PRIVATE VIRTUE FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

CYNTHIA M. KOCH

We have changed our forms of government, . . . but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners, so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.

(Benjamin Rush)¹

AS THE ARMIES withdrew in 1783, Americans began the task of self-definition—a revolutionary process that continues to this day. As modern students of the Revolution have shown, from the beginning the United States was a nation of competing interests, variegated in its cultural composition. Those who held political power shared but perhaps a single commonality—the need to assure the survival through peacetime government for the ideology their military victories had at least momentarily secured.

Somehow the high emotions of the revolutionary period had to be perpetuated into a constructive national sensibility. Political leaders turned to those they had constituted as the polis—largely property-owning white males—and began to shape a national consciousness. Those new Americans, born as British colonists, needed to feel themselves Americans. In the face of continuing threats to national survival—externally from a British government that had hardly conceded defeat and internally from a populace that still carried cultural ties to mother England—a patriotic canon began to emerge in the first decades following the Revolution.

Emotional attachment to a cause is at its highest as individuals in a society embark on cultural transformation, such as a revolutionary war, and success depends on the routinization of such enthusiasm until ultimately the new culture is maintained through the preservation of doctrine and the performance of ritual.² The political leaders of the American revolutionary generation faced this task as the war drew to a close and they turned from the high excitement of the rage militaire to the more sober task of nation building. Inheritors of the British distrust of the military and a traditional Protestant worldview, these men were also Enlightenment intellectuals who believed in the value of decentralized power and the use of reason to improve human affairs. Most important to this discussion of early patriotism, they also held a common faith in the value of education as a means of perpetuating the Revolution’s goals.

Jefferson wrote to Madison from Paris in 1787, Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. Washington’s Farewell Address stressed a fundamental relationship between education and good government: In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. Madison found a system of primary education a vital desideratum and endorsed the recommendations of Monroe, Hamilton, and Washington for the establishment of a national university. John Jay considered knowledge the soul of a Republic, and John Adams argued that the states’ revenues could be put to better use providing public education than in maintaining the poor. In the language of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, their commitment to education was first affirmed in law: Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.³

Among these voices were those who expressed the opinion that not just education, but rather patriotic education, was the surest foundation for a lasting republic. These leaders intuitively grasped the importance of emotional attachment to one’s country. Perhaps because there was no long history and few national traditions, perhaps because they perceived a continuing threat to national independence despite the absence of armed conflict, and perhaps because they were appealing to an unsophisticated male audience, the authors of this patriotic canon employed the story of America’s war for independence to organize a logical and emotionally gripping patriotic story that would perpetuate their republican vision. Expressed with particular clarity in the popular schoolbooks of the era, its elements are recognizable today as icons of American patriotism.

Such an education had to be established quickly because the success of the fledgling nation depended on the rapid dissemination of the values, attitudes, and ideology of a new culture.⁴ It needed to be powerful, dramatic, and true. It needed to be mythic. Noah Webster was one of the most articulate spokesmen for patriotic education:

Our constitutions of civil government are not yet firmly established; our national character is not yet formed; and it is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.⁵

Modern political theorist George Fletcher describes patriotism as an attitude of sentiment and devotion toward a state or nation into which we are born. Like learning a first language or religion, exposure to a political culture and learning a national history normally occur as part of a socialization process. It involves few independent choices and is integral to an individual’s identity. Inherent in personal character, patriotism is an active emotional attachment born of early training and affinities. A similar definition of patriotism is advanced by Charles Taylor who emphasizes the concept of emotional attachment by describing patriotism as based on an identification with others in a particular common enterprise that involves binding commitments somewhere between friendship, or family feeling, on one side, and altruistic dedication on the other. Altruism requires a commitment to all people everywhere, while friendship or family attachments are highly specific. Patriotism entails ties to

Reviews for Bonds of Affection

[foof2you · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A bunch of essays about patriotism that I never would have read unless forced to because of school. This book was not very interest and did not hold me.